Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (17 page)

             
Larry nodded.  “Makes sense.”

             
We ended up waiting for almost an hour.  Whether that was Abu Qadir’s timetable, or just the typical attitude toward time you find in the Arab world, I don’t know.  At any rate, I was getting bored by the time the Honda van pulled up.

             
I almost didn’t notice it.  Larry reached over and prodded my shoulder; I’d been watching Abu Qadir and wondering if he was just going to spend the whole damned day sitting at a table drinking tea.  I looked over and he pointed at the van.  It was a two-tone white and tan job, identical to thousands of vans or minibuses that were rolling over the streets of Iraq.  There was nothing to call attention to it.

             
  The four young men who got out, on the other hand…  I’d gotten a feel for “hard core jihadist” in Libya.  These guys had it in spades.  None of them was much older than maybe twenty-five, they all had beards, and they were looking at everyone around them like they were animals.  They probably suspected that all the people just going about their lives were infidels, apostates, or worse.  They didn’t hang around, either, but made a beeline for Abu Qadir.

             
“I see them,” I said quietly.  These had to be Abu Qadir’s assets.  The other patrons didn’t spare them much attention, but nobody seemed to get too close to them, either.  Even there, fanatics are considered bad news.

             
The four of them sat down at the table with Abu Qadir.  Their passage had cleared the crowd enough that I had a clear view of the table.

             
Abu Qadir did not rise to greet his new arrivals.  There was no display of affection or deference.  He simply spoke to them, his face impassive, and handed over two envelopes.  I suspected that one had money, and the other had a target package.

             
This was the tough part.  We couldn’t let Abu Qadir go, but I didn’t want to let these four loose, either.  I had an idea.  I grabbed the satphone.

             
“Kemosabe, can you get over to the parking lot in the next five minutes?” I asked Jim when he answered.

             
“It’ll be tight,” he replied.  “And doing it without attracting attention is going to be interesting.”

             
“I’ve got what looks like four jihadi hitters about to walk out of here with a target package,” I explained.  “Key-Lock and Albatross are tailing another target, and we’ve got to stay on Abu Qadir.  We need to make these assholes disappear.”

             
“I’ll do what I can, brother, but it’ll be tough,” he answered.  “Are they loaded up and ready to leave yet?”

             
“Negative,” I answered.  “But they’re wrapping up, so you’ve got minutes.”

             
“Moving,” he replied.

             
The four were standing up now.  Abu Qadir stayed seated, establishing himself as the authority figure.  He waved at them as they headed toward their van, and continued to drink his tea.

             
The four jihadis got in their van, and started toward the south end of the parking lot.  “Two-tone white and tan Honda van, four military age males inside, heading south out of the Arrafa Canteen parking lot, southeast corner,” I reported.

             
“Roger,” Jim answered.  “We are five hundred meters south.”

             
“Merging…now,” I followed up, as I watched the van merge into traffic heading south.

             
“I’ve got nothing, no visual,” Jim said.  “Traffic’s kind of thick here.”

             
“I’m about to lose them,” I said.  Damn it, I didn’t want to let those assholes loose.  We had to follow Abu Qadir, but those motherfuckers were going to go kill people.

             
“Negative,” Jim told me.  “We can’t get to the street.  Too many cars.  No contact.”

             
“Fuck,” I snarled.  “That’s it.  We’re snatching this son of a bitch, and he’s going to tell us where and when the attack’s going or I’m going to turn him into fucking dog food.”

             
“You think we’re going to have time?” Larry asked.  Even as he spoke, Abu Qadir got up and started walking away from the canteen, heading toward the west end of the parking lot.  Larry reached down and started the car, pulling us out of the parking space and heading after him, slowly.

             
“Maybe, maybe not,” I answered.  “Given what I know about these kinds of operations, I’d say we’ve got probably a day, unless this was the final confirmation brief.  Seems unlikely, though, if he was passing cash.  I expect they’ll have to get things set up first.”  The rage was calming down, as the analytical part of my brain was now breaking things down.  The truth was that our mission was not to necessarily stop this particular attack, whatever it was.  We were trying to roll up the IRGC operation in Iraq, and prevent the big op, whatever that was.  I figured it was pretty safe to assume that these four hajjis were not the big one.  They were disruption, distraction.

             
But that disruption and distraction would cost lives, and further contribute to the chaos, making it that much easier for the Iranians to tip things over the edge.  Iraq wasn’t my favorite place by any means, and I can’t say I liked the people much, either.  But if the Iranians took it over, it would get worse.  Way worse.  Not that AQI was a better alternative, but the Iranians were better organized, and after Syria, more motivated.  We’d get to AQI in time.

             
We had decided the year before that we’d fight the jihadis wherever we could.  We’d seen too much in East Africa, lost too many friends.  Our own government had decided it wasn’t interested in fighting a war that was killing Americans every day.  We couldn’t stand that.  Maybe we were just stubborn old gunfighters who didn’t know any other way.  We had no illusions about being able to stop them in their tracks by ourselves.  But just because you can’t necessarily win the fight doesn’t mean it ain’t worth fighting.

             
I’d seen enough of what these fuckers did.  I wanted them all dead.  Every other member of the company had the same commitment.  It was part of our screening now.

             
Abu Qadir got into a small, white hatchback, and started driving away.  Interestingly, he didn’t seem to have any security or other handler.  It was just him.  Larry and I followed the hatchback at a distance where we could see him, but hopefully not get picked out as a tail.  I wasn’t sure of this guy’s situational awareness; he really wasn’t acting like he was concerned about being observed at all.

             
I called ahead to Juan and Paul, who were in another Toyota off to the west.  “Abu Qadir is moving in your direction,” I said.  “We might have to hand him off to you for a bit.”

             
“Roger.”  That was the whole reason we had those guys up that way; in fact it was the whole reason we had multiple vehicles on the street today.  A single vehicle would eventually get suspicious, but three or four could go unnoticed.  The trick was effective communication, and dealing with traffic.

             
We didn’t end up needing the second vehicle.  He went around the traffic circle just to the west of the Canteen, then headed northwest for less than a mile before he parked on the street just around the corner from the Hasan Najim Mosque.  He got out of the hatchback as we drove past, and went into a small house on the corner.

             
“You got him?” I asked Juan over the phone.

             
“We’ve got him,” he answered.  “We’ll park just west of the mosque.  You take the east side?”

             
“Yeah.  I don’t think he’ll have a way out there, but we need to keep an eye out.”  I killed the connection, and Larry pulled us up to the curb a street over from the building.  We sat back and set in to wait, and watch.

              The day went by slowly, and the hatchback stayed put.  No one came or went from the house.  It looked like Abu Qadir was sticking.  We pulled everybody but Malachi and Bob off the site, and started getting ready for the hit.

              It was 0230.  The streets were empty, and even the sporadic sounds of violence from deeper into the city had died away.  One thing I had discovered—people in this part of the world don’t like to be up at night.  Even at times when any Western-trained shooter would consider it perfect conditions for operations, Arabs would be asleep.  It worked out great for us.

             
We weren’t fully jocked up.  In the event that some hajji had insomnia and looked out on the street, we didn’t want him to see a stack of heavily armed and armored Americans.  We were dressed in simple, slightly oversized local clothing, with soft armor under our shirts, and mags on belts under the tails.

             
We had started out with a company policy that standardized calibers, if not rifles, to make logistics simpler.  Our go-to cartridge for rifles was 7.62 NATO.  Few of us had any affection for 5.56 NATO, which had let more than one of us down in the past.  However, we had found, especially here, that full size battle rifles sometimes weren’t the best tools for the situation.  So we’d found a compromise for low-profile hits.

             
Each of us was now carrying, slung low under our arms, some sort of SBR in .300 AAC Blackout.  The cartridge had been developed a few years back as a 7.62mm round that could easily be adapted to existing AR platforms, and could be fired suppressed or unsuppressed.  The only thing you had to change on an AR was the barrel.  Ammo was definitely harder to find than 7.62, but the versatility was worth it.

             
Mine was a bit of a Frankengun that I’d built out of parts from Daniel Defense and Ares Armor.  The barrel was only ten inches long.  Larry had an AAC Honey Badger, the original .300 Blackout SBR that AAC had developed to replace the MP5.  Bob was behind us with his Daniel Defense job, which was almost identical to Jim’s.  Everybody was running suppressed.  If we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to do any shooting tonight, but if we did, we didn’t want to announce it too widely.

             
None of us were stacked up very thickly.  We had parked our civilian vehicles at different points around the Hasan Najim Mosque, and were filtering into the target area in ones and twos.  The power was out again, aside from a few houses that had generators, and the mosque.  The low light helped us look more innocuous, in spite of the rifles.

             
I keyed the Bluetooth headset to the low-power radio on my belt.  “Go.”

             
At the signal, all of us dashed toward the gate.  We flowed immediately into a stack, with Little Bob at the forefront.  He was carrying a set of bolt cutters, and immediately went to work on the chain binding the sheet-steel gate closed.

             
The chain had been run through two holes that were randomly punched through the sheet steel.  There was simply no way to keep this quiet, but we tried.  While the rest of us held security, Little Bob placed the bolt cutters on a link in the chain, while Paul held the chain so it wouldn’t rattle and fall as soon as the link was severed.

             
The bolt cutters closed, and the link parted.  Paul kept his hold on it and carefully eased one end through the hole as Little Bob pushed the gate open, trying not to let it rattle too much against the steel.  Some noise was unavoidable, but they managed to keep it to a minimum as Little Bob got the gate open wide enough to admit two of us at a time.

             
The stack flowed into the courtyard, carefully clearing the corners.  There was a Toyota HiLux parked just inside the gate, and various piles of junk against the walls, but no people.  We were careful to steer clear of the junk and the Toyota, and watched where we put our feet.  It was not unknown for these assholes to wire their hidey-holes with IEDs in case anyone came after them.

             
With a combination of caution over possible booby traps, and a concern for keeping stealth as long as possible, we carefully moved through the courtyard to the front door of the house.  There was a narrow porch, overhung by the second floor, with columns holding it up on the outside.  More jugs, boxes, and other junk littered the porch.  We had to step carefully to avoid kicking any of it over.  I really hoped none of it was explosive.

             
Larry got to the door first. I was right behind him.  As soon as we’d gotten off the streets, rifles had come up to the low ready, and Larry’s Honey Badger was presently aimed at the door’s opening.  I ducked across the doorway to get in position to open it.

             
I tested the doorknob as the rest of the team quietly stacked up behind Larry.  It was unlocked.  Good luck for us, but still awfully lackadaisical.  These guys must think they had no opposition to worry about.

             
As I swung the door open and stepped back to let Larry follow his SBR through the door, it occurred to me that it could very well be because aside from us, they didn’t have much opposition to worry about.  How deeply had the IRGC penetrated the Iraqi security forces?